Official Competition

         This is a fascinating, funny, often jaw-droopingly surprising backstage drama cowritten/directed by Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat.   The title both reveals and conceals this fascinating film’s levels of reality. As an art film it announces itself eligible for festivals’ official competition.It should do well there. 

         But its real interest lies in its variety of unofficial competitions.

The idea of a great film project originates in the ego of the financier. He spends big bucks to create — and have his name attached to — two projects as related as metaphor as in vanity. He funds two bridges. The literal spans across water, the metaphoric to an audience, against a vaster gulf. To achieve the latter, bridges must be built between the three isolated star egos.

His bridge to the arts is the brilliant eccentric director Lola — whose very name evokes cinema’s history of destructive vamps, from Louise Brooks on. She insists on casting two major figures, the box office star Felix (infelicitous) and the classical theatre purist Ivan (imperial). Their antithetical backgrounds guarantee disjunction. 

And disfunction. That central triangle houses several unofficial competitions. Of course the two male males mouth mutual respect but butt heads to establish seniority. Their objective is seniority within the production to preserve that in their respective egotisms. 

With a woman in the unaccustomed role of director, aka reigning authority, Lola here tries to free and synchronize her strafing stars by exploding the conventional modes of theatrical rehearsal. Her obviously suspect strategies to free her actors from their reflexes and ruts make for really Absurd Theatre, in the flightless wings. She sets the actors against each other, denies them their usual methods of preparation and performance and, in an ultimate violence against their self-respect, destroys their prized trophies and mementos. Lola makes Artaud seem like Hallmark.  

If the two male leads are competing for their own vain purposes, both for the imminent audience’s and for the boss woman’s approval, their respective egos are riven by the project. In turn each proposes performing both roles, as if to consume their rival out of fear of being consumed by him. The film -- happily? -- ends on the prospect of an actual attempted murder charge.

The ultimate unofficial competition, then, is internal, in each of the three leads. That’s how these three grandiose grotesques come to represent insipid little us. As they fight and scrounge for mere self-respect all three seem miniaturized by the large, industrial/theatrical sets through which they are deployed. The film uses the heightened world of theatre/film to externalize our inner turmoil in discovering and realizing our respective character -- and roles.